Chicago Style Annotations

Kate Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations is very similar, and is on reserve behind the IRC Desk on the Ground Floor.

General guidelines

Annotations can be merely descriptive, summarizing the authors' qualifications, research methods, and arguments.

Annotations can evaluate the quality of scholarship in a book or article. You might want to consider the logic of authors' arguments, and the quality of their evidence. Your findings can be positive, negative, or mixed.

Your professor might also want you to explain why the source is relevant to your assignment.

Ken Battle draws on a close study of government documents, as well as his own research as an extensively-published policy analyst, to explain Canadian child benefit programs. He outlines some fundamental assumptions supporting the belief that all society members should contribute to the upbringing of children. His comparison of child poverty rates in a number of countries is a useful wake-up to anyone assuming Canadian society is doing a good job of protecting children. Battle pays particular attention to the National Child Benefit (NCB), arguing that it did not deserve to be criticized by politicians and journalists. He outlines the NCB’s development, costs, and benefits, and laments that the Conservative government scaled it back in favour of the inferior Universal Child Care Benefit (UCCB). However, he relies too heavily on his own work; he is the sole or primary author of almost half the sources in his bibliography. He could make this work stronger by drawing from others' perspectives and analyses. However, Battle does offer avaluable source for this essay, because the chapter provides a concise overview of government-funded assistance currently available to parents. This offers context for analyzing the scope and financial reality of child poverty in Canada.

Sociology professors Kerr and Beaujot analyze the demographics of impoverished families. Drawing on data from Canada’s annual Survey of Consumer Finances, the authors consider whether each family had one or two parents, the age of single parents, and the number of children in each household. They analyze child poverty rates in light of both these demographic factors and larger economic issues. Kerr and Beaujot use this data to argue that

Rules! rules! rules!

The Chicago Manual of Style states the following formatting rules. Check your assignment description in case your instructor has other instructions.

The text should be double-spaced.

Numbering starts on the first page of writing (not the title page), at the top right of the page.

Reference list entries must have a hanging indent (to do this in Microsoft Word 2003, click Format, then Paragraph, then Special, and choose Hanging).

There should be 1 inch (2.54 cm) margins all around (top, bottom, left, and right) on each page.

Use Times Roman font, or a similar serif font.

Each paragraph should be indented using the tab key.

More Sample Annotations

Cornell University Library offers theseexamples of both APA and MLA format descriptive bibliographies.